Spokepoker
Spokepoker

Spokepoker's CD starts out promisingly. "Elations," the first song of six, is full of enticing, quirky musical phrasings reminiscent of the Throwing Muses. Following that is, "Evelyn's Tracks," a catchy, straightforward rocker. By the third song however, the beat slows and singer/guitarist Valerie Stadler begins to drone, sounding more and more like 10,000 Fatuous Maniacs. Despite some interesting guitar work along the way, by the time the fifth song played, a relentless dirge called, "Stranger," I was checking the play list to see how many more songs I was going to have to sit through. In general, the promise of the first two songs makes this recording good enough to recommend keeping an eye on this local band.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" October 19, 1994 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Weba Garretson
Weba World
(Catasonic)

"You're a lesbian and you take it up the butt," shouts throaty Weba at the beginning of "Ventilator," a song about mistaken identities and testy L.A. drivers. Welcome to Weba World where zany performance artist, singer, songwriter and former chanteuse, Weba Garretson, hosts an outing into the far reaches of her comic, feminist psyche.

These half-spoken, beat-style, anecdotal songs tell women's stories. In "Wild Bill," Weba becomes a jazzy, Peggy Lee-type-of Joan Vollmer balancing the apple on her head while William Burroughs takes aim with his "tiny gun." Her tribute, "Diane Arbus," relates the tale of the dark photographer getting her period during a photo shoot. Even Garretson's gutsy cover version of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," is used as the framework for a rape story, in which she distances herself from the act by remembering, "I'm just a statistic; one out of every three."

On this generally upbeat record Weba reveals herself good naturedly, as both life's jester and the object of its wry laughter.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" October 12, 1994 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Indigo Girls
Swamp Ophelia
(Epic)

Swamp Ophelia is another fine record from the Indigo Girls which further illustrates how much the sum of their parts outweighs their individual charms. "Emily's songs are about relationships with other people. My songs are all about relationships with myself," opined Amy Ray recently in Us. But its not merely point of view that differentiates these two songwriters - its the music.

For instance the raucous Ray-penned piece "Touch Me Fall" moves through several complex movements, from a fully orchestrated string segment, to a grunge guitar jam. While conversely, Emily Saliers' sentimental "Fare Thee Well" is a spare voice and guitar ballad.

Yet there's no conflict here. In fact, its this yin and yang at the heart of the Indigos that creates the true magic of their sound. One has only to listen to their soaring signature harmonies and acoustic guitar collaborations to understand what Saliers means when she says, "We both realize what makes us special - when we're special - is the contribution that each one of us makes that the other can't do on our own."

Despite its innovations, Swamp Ophelia, like previous works, is mainly a folk-pop album with its emphasis on great singing and introspective songwriting. "This Train," Ray's song about the Holocaust, taking care to name homosexuals among the Nazi's victims, is a stand-out on both counts. And Saliers' songwriting has never been better than on "Mystery," (featuring guest vocalist Jane Siberry) when she croons, "you like the taste of danger, it shines like sugar on your lips."

"We are fortunate ones," sing Amy and Emily on the records opener, "Fugitive." Indeed, by all indications the Indigo Girls' collaboration continues to be as fortunate for them as it is for their audience.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" May 18, 1994 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Lisa Germano
Happiness
(4AD)

Its a music reviewer's job to sort through the mounds of free promotional CDs to separate the pearls from the slimy mollusks. There aren't that many pearls. But when you do get one its always easy to spot. Its the one you to turn up after the first few bars. Its the one you tell your friends about the next day. Its the one you would almost pay for yourself, if you had to.

Such a record is Lisa Germano's, Happiness. Originally recorded and released by Capitol records, Happiness was supposed to launch Germano as the new Bonnie Raitt. Leave it to the label who didn't think the American public wanted to hear the Beatles in the early '60s to try to package paté as liverwurst.

One can only wonder if these songs, many about alienation and misunderstanding weren't brought about by the business of music itself. Luckily Germano was picked up by 4AD, who recognized this pearl for who she was. They remixed the album, removed the incongruous cover version of "These Boots Are Made for Walking," and re-released it.

From its ironic title through to the end, Happiness is a complex, intriguing record. The arrangements go from simple, almost country-like riffs to sonically rich layers of electric and acoustic music.

But its the words, sometimes lost in the barrage, that tell the real story. Germano explores the dark side of her psyche, her relationships, the search for love, all from the perspective of someone who is constantly questioning their own validity. Repeatedly the songs parrot the idea - as told by invisible parents, therapists, well-meaning friends - that unhappiness is just a matter of perspective. In the impish, "Bad Attitude" she sings, You wish you were happy, but you're not, ha, ha, ha, if life was easy then you wouldn't learn anything now would you? In the song "Just Around the Corner" its, What a waste to feel the way I feel when happiness is just around the corner. And on the title song, Pain and sadness are real to me, they stick around, won't let me be, sad, but true, self indulgent, inconsiderate bitch.

Throughout the stories of nervous breakdowns, depression and longing, Germano never loses her sense of humor. Perhaps it is the pop hooks that elevate the music from the potential quagmire of a complete downer. Or maybe it is just her girlish voice and the spark of hope it engenders that make me want to hear these songs again and again.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" April 27, 1994 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Belinda Carlisle
Real
(VIRGIN)

"I even did this album cover shoot without makeup," laughs Belinda Carlisle. "The whole thing is as real as it gets."

Quotes like these make one wonder about the nature of reality. If Carlos Castenada was correct in purporting that reality is a personal and relative concept then the definition of "real" may be relative as well. Particularly for Carlisle, an ex-cheerleader, married to a movie star's son who lives in Beverly Hills. Real, realer, realest.

Belinda Carlisle's fifth outing into post-Go-Go reality, "Real," sounds really, really, really exactly like all her other albums- which were presumably less real. So, once I figured out that Real was not going to be a set of tunes decrying world hunger, war or homelessness, I began to enjoy the disc for what it was — another bubble gum ode to teenage angst.

With the help of former bandmate Charlotte Caffey — who with brother Tom co-wrote most of the songs on the album —Carlisle manages to capture the essence of what had always been charming about her music with and without the Go-Gos. Songs like "Goodbye Day," "One With You," "Where Love Hides," and the album's best cut "Lay Down Your Arms," are the type of likable, uptempo, pop tunes that joyously reduce the complexity of life into mindless toe-tapping.

Belinda tries and fails to stretch her vocal capacities on a few tracks, but thankfully relies mostly on her familiar, girlish warbling. Her shameless over-indulgence in voice-overs on virtually every track is reminiscent of ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog whispering to us to take a chance on her.

Once again, by record's end, Carlisle has lured us into believing that real life is like a 1966 Annette Funicello movie. And if you believe that, maybe its time for you to get Real.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" October 13, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Ovarian Trolley
Crocodile Tears
(Shimmy Disc)

When they weren't snipping off the ends of their own penises for uncleanness, the male leaders of ancient Hebrew tribes compulsorily banished women from the camps during their menstrual periods. They were thought to be impure. Native Americans had moon lodges where women would go to rest and bond in sisterhood during their "moon time". Men, it seems, have always been relieved to have women disappear when they're cranky and infertile.

Perhaps this is why women's music has taken such a long time in evolving from Joani Mitchell's apologetic pleas for equal partnerships to the righteously angry, demanding voices of today's female musicians. If men could have the Twinkle defense then it was clearly time for women to embrace the power of PMS -- for grrrls to wrestle punk from the boyyys.

Out of this energy emerges the S.F. band Ovarian Trolley. The three piece, fronted by sisters Jennifer and Laurie Hall - playing drums and bass respectively - has released their first LP, Crocodile Tears. A collection of songs that sound like the wailing of unleashed menstruating banshees, Crocodile Tears is the fulfillment of the promise of last year's delicious 7", Rogue.

Like dueling P.J. Harvey's, Laurie and Jennifer lay their eerie genetically enhanced harmonies over relentlessly raw compositions. From the lament that is the title song to the hilarity of "Senorita," about the feminist travail inherent in a walk through the Mission, the record is a potent trip through as many mood and tempo changes as there are reasons to take Midol.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" November 17, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Jane Siberry
When I was a Boy
(REPRISE)

In the Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire, an angel decides to trade in his wings for an earth-bound existence and the fragile, human opportunity to fall in love. The beguiling lack of emotional cynicism that creates the wistful tone in that movie finds its aural equivalent in Jane Siberry's newest release, When I was a Boy.

In the bittersweet "Love is Everything" Siberry keens:
love is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you're chickening out aren't you?

It is the sweetness and sadness of human relationships she explores throughout these new songs. And when Siberry is not making her passion play for earthly love she is unabashedly searching out the divine. "Calling All Angels" (with fellow Canadian k.d. lang on vocals), "An Angel Stepped Down," "Temple," and "At the Beginning of Time," are the most obvious of these musical psalms. Yet all these songs are haunted by the just-inaudible rustling of distant wings.

Siberry does not traverse much new musical terrain on this self-produced, third record. Instead, like a master composer she takes a theme and works it from every possible angle until this seems much less like a collection of individual songs, than it does like a concerto with many movements - and her winsome voice stringing it all together. When I Was a Boy has the lush, hypnotic feel of a Cocteau Twins record, except you can understand the lyrics.

The soundtrack Siberry creates does not paint a sunny picture of worldly fulfillment. She is more interested in the soft light breaking through the storm clouds illuminating the one plaintive note that is her voice.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" September 8, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Pat Benatar
Gravity's Rainbow
(CHRYSALIS)

Janis Ian
Breaking Silence
(MORGAN CREEK RECORDS)

There was always something unauthentic about Pat Benatar. She was one of those rockers in the early '80s about whom music journalists wrote endless articles entitled, "Women in Rock." But Benatar was to rock contemporaries like Chrissy Hynde and Deborah Harry what the Monkees were to the Rolling Stones. She may have tried to look tough carving those notches into her lipstick case, but we knew Pat was safe.

Though safety is a quality more suited to a family car than a rock singer, Benatar always had one thing going for her that Chrissy and Debbie didn't have - she could actually sing. And that classically-trained voice is the one feature that slices through the mire of mundane lyrics and boring riffs on Pat's 11th album, Gravity's Rainbow. Its not that the songs on this record are terrible. In fact, "Everybody Lay Down" could have been a big, rockin' hit a decade ago. But today this type of sanitized rock and roll is as irrelevant as a re-run of Dynasty.

The press release accompanying Gravity's Rainbow claims that Benatar has "returned to her rock roots with a vengeance." This is not a modern Pat moving into new musical genres like she did with her previous release, a blues record, but an old Pat still trying to hit us with her best shot. Unfortunately, what worked in 1983 doesn't play in 1993 - just ask George Bush.

Perhaps Benatar could take a lesson from Linda Ronstadt who knew when it was time to hang up the roller skates and hook up with Nelson Riddle.

Janis Ian, on the other hand, could never be called unauthentic. Ian built a successful career in the '70s writing clever folk songs exposing the dark side of her emotional life. She dropped out of sight during most of the '80s. The decade didn't lend itself much to her style of bleak, self-mocking introspection, and "At Seventeen" didn't lend itself well to a disco remix.

The press release for Breaking Silence, her first album in over ten years boasts that the Janis who made this album is one who "looks up rather than down." Not the old Janis, but a new and improved one they tell us. Though I don't celebrate chronic depression as a lifestyle, this apology for her earlier work made me wonder if there might be secret plans for a perky workout video.

Despite the disclaimer though, her recognizable acoustic guitar playing and smart poetry make Breaking Silence a stylistically traditional Ian album. Gently hopeful lyrics on many of this record's personal ballads lead one to believe that Ian has finally lived down being the lonely, ugly duckling. And songs like "Tattoo," about the Holocaust, and "His Hands," a story of abuse told from the perspective of a battered wife, allay any fears that she has become a lightweight.

Perhaps what her press agent was trying to say is that you don't have to be miserable to create good art. Its gratifying to witness the reemergence of one of the spiritual mothers of artists like the Indigo Girls and Tori Amos. Watching her sing at the Great American Music Hall recently it was apparent that Ian's songs, like Leonard Cohen's, hold up under the test of time. Or maybe folkies just age better than rockers.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" June 23, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Carla Olson
Within an Ace
(WATERMELON RECORDS)

Carla Olson has been a staple in the music scene in Los Angeles since the early '80s. She was originally from Austin, Texas where she and Kathy Valentine (just back from a brief gig with London's Girlschool) had formed the Textones, a country-tinged, new wave band. But the biggest state on the continent wasn't big enough for Kathy and Carla. So they came to L.A. during the heyday of bands like The Motels and X. There they received local critical acclaim, but no big money offers. Frustrated with this lack of upward mobility guitarist Kathy left the respected Textones, to everyone's surprise, to play bass in the biggest joke band in town: The Go Go's.

The rest, as they say, is history. Kathy Valentine went on to grace the cover of Rolling Stone and Carla continued to write competent songs and hold a marginal musical career together through several incarnations of country-rock bands. Carla's career languished while she watched women like the more-country Maria McKee or the more-rock Johnette Napolitano make the big breakthroughs.

Often called the female Tom Petty, it is more Olson's' blonde angularity than her songwriting which resembles the Traveling Willbury. While the songs on Within an Ace, her latest attempt at the big time, are the work of a proficient writer, these traditional, blues-inspired rock tunes - a departure from country - lack the energy and bite of a Petty. They lack the energy of the "We've Got the Beat" for that matter. Where contemporary female songwriters like Lucinda Williams or Suzanne Vega are pushing into new emotional or musical terrain in their respective genres, Carla plods through the paces of verse-chorus-verse without pumping any fresh blood into the pop formula.

By far the best song on this disc is the opener, "Justice," a tale of Southern racial inequity. But after this first tune the albums sinks into an unremarkable groove in which it is mired to the end.

On Within an Ace, Carla is teamed, among others, with bass player Jesse Sublett, another Austin transplant and former band mate of Kathy Valentine's from her failed comeback band, World's Cutest Killers. If this record doesn't push Carla into the success she's relentlessly pursued for over a decade, maybe it's time she gave Kathy a call. The public's current insatiable appetite for country-pop music might finally make a band like the Textones famous after all.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" April 14, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

Ovarian Trolley
Serenity/Rogue
(Imp)

A friend of mind recently returning from a concert told me, with an ecstatic smile on her face, "Punk is alive and well and in the hands of women." In the hands of S.F.'s Ovarian Trolley, punk is thriving. Sisters Jennifer and Laurie Hall, playing drums and slap bass respectively, provide the relentless rhythms that drive the songs on this 7" single. Formerly of Glorious Clitoris, the Halls have teamed with guitarist Buck Bito to create a sonic statement reminiscent of a particularly raucous Kristen Hersh without her lithium.

The sisters harmonize eerily, vocally soaring above the churning and thumping guitars like sea gulls wailing over a napalmed beach. The effect is a sound which is both plaintive and combative. If Ovarian Trolley can cook up a batch of songs as diverse and competent as these two tasty hors de ouvres, they will surely rise to the top of the heap of foxcore-grrrl bands with whom they will be lumped.

Appeared in "SF Weekly" March 31, 1993 © Suzanne Rush 2001

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